People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth [LWN.net]

Raphaël Hertzog interviews Mark Shuttleworth about Ubuntu and its relationship with Debian. "Before Ubuntu, we have a two-tier world of Linux: there's the community world (Debian, Fedora, Arch, Gentoo) where you support yourself, and the restricted, commercial world of RHEL and SLES/SLED. While the community distributions are wonderful in many regards, they don't and can't meet the needs of the whole of society; one can't find them pre-installed, one can't get certified and build a career around them, one can't expect a school to deploy at scale a platform which is not blessed by a wide range of institutions. And the community distributions cannot create the institutions that would fix that."

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First post...?

Posted Nov 21, 2011 6:38 UTC (Mon) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

From another LWN article: "Certain topics, it seems, are just meant to stress-test the LWN comment system; after the unveiling of "the Journal" on November 18, "the works of Lennart Poettering" will have to be added to that list."

I thought "the sayings of Mark Shuttleworth" was already on that list. Should we be happy that he's apparently dropped off it? Do we have GNOME 3 to thank? :)

First post...?

Posted Nov 21, 2011 8:50 UTC (Mon) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172) [Link]

No, it's just that Jef got a new hobby.

First post...?

Posted Nov 21, 2011 18:23 UTC (Mon) by theophrastus (guest, #80847) [Link]

You-all are suggesting that the bull can habituate to the red cape?

and which is the reddest? Poettering, Shuttleworth, or, Tanenbaum?

First post...?

Posted Nov 22, 2011 15:32 UTC (Tue) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]

When I saw no comments, I had an idea to write that Mark Shuttleworth is not "behind" Debian, he is an "add-on". But I decided that it would be better to have no comments than an inane thread. Perhaps other posters also decided that they cannot add anything valuable to the topic. I'm sure it would be a hot topic on Slashdot, but this is not Slashdot.

First post...?

Posted Nov 25, 2011 9:27 UTC (Fri) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]

> When I saw no comments, I had an idea to write that Mark Shuttleworth is
> not "behind" Debian, he is an "add-on". But I decided that it would be
> better to have no comments than an inane thread. Perhaps other posters
> also decided that they cannot add anything valuable to the topic. I'm
> sure it would be a hot topic on Slashdot, but this is not Slashdot.

The "people behind Debian" series interviews Debian Developers, which status Mark holds (you can check this at http://db.debian.org/ if you want). I don't think he does much technical work for the Debian project these days, but he has attended reasonably recent Debconf events and sometimes participates on the mailing lists.

People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth

Posted Nov 23, 2011 15:56 UTC (Wed) by maurizio.dececco (guest, #6585) [Link]

Actually, i think the point raised is very good, but unfortunately the institution that can "fix it" cannot be a company, of any kind.

IMHO there is an entity missing in the Linux distribution world, that is a kind of foundation in the like of Eclipse, the Linux Foundation or others.
An entity that can also also the fragility inherent in a distribution that is backed by a small company having difficulties in finding a good business model (even Red Hat, is not inherently making money building the distribution but around it).

And an entity that could be a more appropriate partner for things like multinational companies or for government organizations than a community (and it is not a matter of how good a community is, is a matter of how certain kind of organizations thinks and works).

People Behind Debian: Mark Shuttleworth

Posted Nov 23, 2011 19:57 UTC (Wed) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

> While the community distributions are wonderful in many regards,
> [...]; one can't find them pre-installed [...]

Actually, a lot of consumer / small office NAS devices come with Debian pre-installed, and IIRC HP uses/used Debian in its print servers, so this isn't entirely true...

Scientific LInux, Centos?

Posted Nov 24, 2011 12:59 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

Where do SL and Centos fit in? They're community-supported, but code-wise they are more or less identical to RHEL.

Personally I'd say use Scientific Linux if you want RHEL, but don't want to pay for it and don't want to be able to sue someone if it won't work. Arguments for Centos very similar.

Scientific LInux, Centos?

Posted Nov 25, 2011 9:44 UTC (Fri) by dag- (subscriber, #30207) [Link]

Leaving out CentOS and Scientific Linux was deliberate and serves Mark's purpose here. Why mention it and weaken his own ca(u)se ?

Scientific LInux, Centos?

Posted Jan 2, 2012 5:44 UTC (Mon) by mfedyk (guest, #55303) [Link]

One thing to keep in mind is that he was talking about "at the time".

At that time there was no clear leader in the RHEL clone distro scene and it was very fledgling. Remember whitebox and tao linux? They're not around anymore...

Also, please note that I am not an Ubuntu user anymore (and haven't been since 2008), now I either use Fedora, SL or Debian.